His ex-wife Joëlle Martin was sentenced to a six-month probationary period for complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds.
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He was prosecuted for having paid his ex-wife for a fictitious job of parliamentary assistant between 2002 and 2013. The current president of the PS of the departmental council of Gers and former minister of François Hollande, Philippe Martin, was sentenced on Tuesday January 4 to Paris to two years in prison suspended for embezzlement of public funds.
In solidarity with his ex-wife Joëlle Martin, sentenced to six months’ probation for complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds, the former deputy of Gers will have to reimburse the 238,000 euros that she had received in total at the Assembly national, civil party.
Both were declared ineligible for three years and will have to pay respectively 70,000 and 30,000 euros in fines.
The former couple could not provide “no material trace” working from Joelle Martin who had “no material made available” or “no contact with other assistants who were unaware” of his job, underlined the financial prosecutor Sébastien de La Touanne during their appearance on preliminary admission of guilt (CRPC) before the 32nd chamber of the judicial tribunal of Paris.
They kept a “total discretion on this hiring”, he added. Philippe Martin had thus omitted to declare it to the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP).
Philippe Martin, 68, will also have to reimburse 194,000 euros to the National Assembly for having paid, with money from the Palais Bourbon, a woman who worked for the PS in Auch between 2005 and 2012.
“I agree to recognize the facts and accept the proposed penalties”, declared the former Minister of Ecology from July 2013 to March 2014 and former president of the French Agency for Biodiversity.